Transformations, ideology, and the real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and other narratives : finding "the thing itself" / Maximillian E. Novak.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Novak, Maximillian E., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731--Criticism and interpretation.

Defoe, Daniel.

Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731. Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731.

Realism in literature.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

x, 239 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press, [2015]

Summary:

Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives: Finding "The Thing Itself" explores important problems in the fiction of Daniel Defoe, from his interest in rendering reality (what he called "the Thing itself"), whether in painting or prose fiction, to the various ways in which Defoe's works were read by contemporaries and by those novelists who attempted to imitate and comment upon his Life and Strange Surprizing Adventure of Robinson Crusoe decades after its publication. A number of sections in this book attempt to consider the complexities of various aspects of Defoe's writings: his way of evoking the inability of language to describe a vivid scene or moments of overwhelming emotion, his interest in the fiction of islands or Utopia, his gradual development of the concepts surrounding Crusoe's cave, Defoe's fascination for the horrors of cannibalism, and some of the ways he attempted to defend his work and serious fiction in general. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives establishes the complexities and originality of Defoe as a writer of fiction. Book jacket.

Contents:

Defoe as an innovator of fictional form

Picturing the thing itself, or not: Defoe, painting, prose fiction, and the arts of describing

The unmentionable and the ineffable in Defoe's fiction

Novel or fictional memoir: the scandalous publication of Robinson Crusoe

Meatless fridays: cannibalism as theme and metaphor in Robinson Crusoe

Edenic desires: Robinson Crusoe, the Robinsonade, and utopian forms

Strangely surpriz'd by Robinson Crusoe: a response to David Fishelov's "Robinson Crusoe, 'the other,' and the poetics of surprise"

"Looking with wonder upon the sea" : Defoe's maritime fictions, Robinson Crusoe, and "the curious age we live in"

The cave and the grotto: imagined interiors and realist form in Robinson Crusoe

"The sume of humane misery?": ambiguities of exile in Defoe's fiction

Ideological tendencies in three crusoe narratives by British novelists during the period following the French Revolution: Charles Dibdin's Hannah Hewit, the demale Crusoe, Maria Edgeworth's Forester, and Frances Burney's The wanderer.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611494853

1611494850

OCLC:

897339074